Why have Poe's life and work often been associated with mystery?

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849)

1) a) Why have Poe’s life and work often been associated with mystery?

Perhaps it had a lot to do with the success of his originality and creativity in infusing a tired genre of literature with an excitement and vitality that no other author of the time was capable. His tale of buried treasure, "The Gold Bug" created quite a sensation at the time of its publication and required several reprints. Then, his introduction of the brilliant French sleuth C. Auguste Dupin with his intuitive and deductive reasoning to resolve unsolvable mysteries clearly established Poe as the premier mystery writer.

b) A Summary of Poe’s life

Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809. He was the son of two actors who both died within the first year after he was born. A couple named “Allan” gave him a good home and a good education, but in his teenage years, Poe often quarelled with his father and left home as soon as possible. He had several jobs, but lost them because of drinking. Poe died in 1859 at the age of 40.

2) English and American Romantic writers

England: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Sir Walter Scott

America: Nathanael Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman

3) What is Romanticism?

Romanticism is an intellectual movement that flourished in Europe between the middle of the 18th and 19th centuries. It rejected the notions of the enlightenment that had dominated European thought since the early 18th century.

The most dominant charateristic of the Romantic movement was the rejection of the rational and the intellectual in favor of the intuitive and the emotional. In the nineteenth century, a romance was a prose narrative telling a fictional story that dealt with its subjects and characters in a symbolic, imaginative, and non-realistic way. Typically, a romance would deal with plots and people that were exotic, remote in time or place from the reader, and obviously imaginary.

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4) What is a gothic story?

Gothic means that the author emphasizes the grotesque, the mysterious, the horrible, the ghostly, and the fear that is aroused in the reader. A gothic story or a ghost story will often have a setting that will be in an old, decaying mansion far out in a countryside. The mansion is filled with cobwebs, strange noises, bats, and an abundance of secret panels and doors. Poe uses every literary trick possible to give us eerie sensations. He also utilizes shadows to create dark and scary images, trap doors that consume the protagonist, and ...

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